Can’t Take It Seriously
Spring Breakers director, Harmony Korine, talked to Paris Match Magazine about his new movie. Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, and Vanessa Hudgens star in the indie movie out March 22.
In Spring Breakers “Brit, Candy, Cotty, and Faith have been best friends since grade school. They live together in a boring college dorm and are hungry for adventure. All they have to do is save enough money for spring break to get their shot at having some real fun.
A serendipitous encounter with rapper “Alien” promises to provide the girls with all the thrill and excitement they could hope for. With the encouragement of their new friend, it soon becomes unclear how far the girls are willing to go to experience a spring break they will never forget.”
Under the jump you will find a full translation from the interview. Thanks to @flawlessleademi for the translation!
Paris Match: Leading characters in neon bikinis and stars teenagers love: we weren’t expecting this from you. Is this your midlife crisis?
Harmony Korine: Are you kidding? It’s my time to shine! My big carnival! The little brat is always there, he just went to the next level!
PM: Did you suffer from being a marginal filmmaker?
HK: My underground status never frustrated me. When I was 18 years old, Larry Clark took a picture of me in a skate park and asked me to write the “Kids” scenario, what interested me was that the characters and the images I had in mind and that I never saw on screen exist. Today, I love the idea of making my work as radical as possible the most commercial way possible. To try to culturally contaminate spirits.
PM: Where does the idea of using spring break, this period of holidays during which American students all go through debauchery?
HK: I was always attracted to the cohabitation of beauty and ugliness, seduction and dirtiness. Both are usually tied. I’ve been collecting for years pictures of drinking bouts and students parties going wrong. I don’t know why but I have been seeing in this pornography of debauchery some kind of poetry. That was the way the movie was born: I thought it would be cool to use this shrill music and this color overdose to shoot a movie that would break the subject. It wasn’t about doing a presentation but about scrapping under this idiotic polish to find something a little deeper and more mythological.
PM: You take a great pleasure in turning Disney stars into wild characters to attract the general public. Don’t you have the impression to sell your soul to the devil?
HK: Pop is nowadays an universal language. To communicate and be heard, you have to use these codes. That’s why I thought of this movie as an electro buckle, a buckle of pop songs with ultrashort scenes that keep coming back like a sampler… I wanted “Spring Breakers” to have two lecture levels: a Hollywood movie and its ironic commentary. However, it’s not an abstract hoax. I didn’t want to trap anyone. Maybe the teenagers going to watch it will only see the neon swimsuits, but what I’m sure of, is they’ll live through something completely different, a hypnotic experience that’s almost physical, close to a narcotic trip.
PM: The film is full of references to Britney Spears… Is it because she represents best the vacuity and the absence of marks of this generation fed by MTV?
HK: Britney, like Selena, Vanessa and Ashley, represent the American dream. They have a symbol of innocence an of beauty that often explodes in some sort of consumerist hysteria. I have to admit it fascinates me. If Britney Spears was age appropriate to play the role, I would have hired her without any hesitation. She is the ancestor of my characters.
PM: On set, you had to manage with the paparazzi glued to your stars…
HK: It was pure craziness! I had never lived something like that! Usually, I shoot in the gutter and no one cares. We were in natural sets, and, suddenly, here were helicopters above us and 150 paparazzi taking pictures of our shoots to upload them on Internet a few seconds later. Then I found cool that, in a conceptual point of view, two films were coexisting. Ours and the public’s. It joins the movie’s message.
PM: In your beginnings, you admitted you hated music videos and publicity. Today, you do both…
HK: My hate towards music videos come from their advertising dimension. I’d rather create a commercial for a toilet cleaner than a Coldplay music video. At least, there isn’t any cheating on the merchandise, it seems more honest! But when I shoot Macaulay Culkin licking his lips along to a Sonic Youth song, it’s the same process as my movies… There isn’t any contradiction.
PM: What do you answer to those who accuse you of styling and glamorizing violence?
HK: My characters are a mirror of the American culture, of its obsession for weapons and video games. The history of cinema is principally women and guns! If you get rid of that, what’s left? I wouldn’t be able to make a movie of a man crying, sitting on his house’s roof, it isn’t me.
PM: You grew up watching Godard, Herzog, Cassavetes and Fassbinder, your heroes’ movies… What’s left of their inheritance in “Spring Breakers”?
HK: When I was little, my dad took me a lot to the cinema. I was very cinephile. Nowadays, I go less. I prefer living in my bubble and let the images and the ideas come out in a purer way, without any interferences. All the masterpieces we discover in our childhood stay with us forever anyway, they are here, they are living in me.
PM: A few years ago, you said you wanted to save the cinema from the ambient conformity, is it still your ambition?
HK: I must have been high when I said that, because I don’t even know what it means! Today, I mostly aspire to make Harmony Korine’s movies, which doesn’t sound too bad to me… I really want to get back to painting and photography.
PM: You exposed in Paris a few drawings representing Ben Laden and E.T. arm in arm. Do you consider yourself provocative?
HK: It’s fun to make people react. I wouldn’t like to make things no one would notice. But, in general, I only do things to have fun; even though it usually puts me in trouble, I know it.
PM: Did becoming a father make you become wiser?
HK: No, it only made me happier.
MC